the storm during the singularity part three of a serial
The house is quiet, its dawn. I, outside walking up the old wide york stone path that leads from the kitchen door up the walled garden to the wooden gates in the centre of the far wall. Beyond the wall the valley, we have almost finished planting this set of trees. I am dressed in my black pyjamas that are dotted with silver and red stars, and my hooded towelling dressing gown. The hood is raised over my head to help keep me warm, oh and the brown soft leather soled boots that i have taken the laces out of so I can wear them like this… Everyone else is asleep. I am not sleeping well here. My relationship with my other companion, language, has become strange and circuitous. These days I think in english, my original language only appearing when I speak or read it. A storm is approaching, the wind (is) blowing in from the west, the house and valley sheltered by the hills, the high brick wall of the western wall protecting the garden. Dark grey clouds heading towards me and the house. The dawn light growing, the storm resisting and then lightning flashes illuminating the the garden and valley. The wind isn’t too strong, the rain falling onto the ground here we have planted trees and bushes. The statues that I purchased getting their first wash of the year in their new home. The pale stone of the statues seeming to be even paler than before. I shelter in the glass house, there is a chair, made of an aluminium frame and green plastic netting. I sit down and listen to the rain falling on the glass roof. {Language and I are exploring together — all the places I go to, and everything contained there tends towards the purest form of language, even if its never spoken aloud, never communicated. Though sometimes the words in both my main languages are written out in notebooks, sometimes the same notebook, sometimes spoken to him. Every event and place that is slightly out of the ordinary, is noticed and a meaning ascribed to it.} A storm is both a firework display, bang, flash, bang and a war, a war machine. This is why I feel comfortable even in my nightware and dressing gown. The storm is frustrating my expectations, distracting me from the thought of running back to the house and making him… the weightier subjects haunt me, most specifically that we nomads do not live alone in this world, the war machine haunts the world but is always surveilled. Does the house have a lightening rod from the high chimney down into the earth? I make a note to check the survey reports later today. The architect is coming today to discuss the barn. The storm remains as urgent, merely displacing its centre of gravity as the spectacle above passes eastwards, its an unexpected revelation. Insomnia can be a nice thing. Storms as usually more hidden from us, only rarely do they surround us so fully. There is a crack in the corner of the glass house through which water flows like a cascade of atoms in free fall through space, deviating from their straight trajectory just a little so that you can call it a change in movement… no more than the minimum… a stream formed out of drops of rain. I lift my feet off the ground onto the chair.
The storm is passing, the storm is hard, in poems it is presented as soft, but in actuality its hard with its water/electricity/wind refusing to be dominated. And here the hat the dawn light has announced the beginning of the day, an oblique and hard beginning. I have put my feet up on the brown wooden fruit box that has the word MacIntyre printed in black on the side. The shadows and lines are moving in the early morning light. If it lessons just a little more I’ll run back through the rain to the house. I think of the desk in my temporary office in what will become the library eventually, its tall ceiling and the mezzanie with stairs that need some maintenance, the notebook on the desk, the set of pencils and pens in the tray and drawer, the bigger lower drawer locked filled with documents and a hidden steel container, it’s strange how the passing storm with its thunder and lightning illuminates these hidden places in the surface of the world. The air is feeling slightly electrified, ozone and shafts of lightning crackling behind the walled garden. Nobody but me awake in this place, the heart of this geopolitical space. The others all asleep, we have three primary languages, all of us translators working translating into english. I speak to my children in english, with a home counties accent… My children will learn Japanese one day. The weather will change after this storm, will it be better or worse I cannot imagine. Overnight I imagine the clouds built up into huge grey towers floating overland towards me and the house before passing eastwards towards the sea on the other side. Though we pretend that we do not know what the singularities taking place are in fact we do, it is one of those things which are true secrets, at the heart of things, of the criminal events, in cities, places and the world. They are like the prelude to the storm that has passed, its now to the east and the rain is subsiding. I think about running back through the rain to the house, how wet will I get? Will the sun push through the storm clouds spending long moments rising and streams of photons illuminating the morning. I wish I had brought a notebook with me to document the events. Capturing the separate meanings common to us all and uniting them into a whole. From my vantage point in the glass house I can see the storm passing towards the east the lightning in the hills, across the plateau beyond them, unfamiliar like the body of un(der)muscled young actors in dramas pretending to be athletic and strong, there bodies always betray them. In the library the storm would be like their bodies stretching out for the books just out of reach, for storms here do not indicate sentient clouds passing by, in the not too distant future however they will be infected… The rain has become light. I open the door and am about to run for the house when I see the fox emerge that had been sheltering from the storm in the broken shed across the walled garden, on the veranda. We look at one another and I run for the house in the rain, its heavier than i thought and I’m very wet when I enter the house through the kitchen door. I close and lock the door behind me, dripping water onto the floor, leave my boots by the back door and go upstairs hanging my wet robe on the bathroom towel rack/radiator water dripping into the tiled floor. I go back downstairs for a drink, towelling my hair, the house a haven , a protective zone from the gaping sex of the dawn sky. The storm has gone, I drink some yoghurt in the silence. I cannot hear the outside here in this room, on the stairs, in the bedroom, the house is silent. Others may be awake, listening to my moving through it to the bedroom, an enticing bedroom, perhaps the silence of the house reveals who inhabits the house or the singularity to come. I found my youngest daughter in bed with him. I was damp and aware of being cold. I lay down. Song, you are so cold and damp. He said. I’ve been outside, got trapped by the storm, warm me up. I lay against them warming myself on his and their bodies. I was outside I say again, there was a fox sheltering on the veranda. He was asleep again almost immediately.
An hour or so later, my daughter got out of bed and headed downstairs to get breakfast with her sister. I’m aching, unable to move. He says. The first storm is long gone now, bright sunshine illuminating the walled garden. Those may be rain clouds coming from the west, behind them another storm is coming in from the west. Insomnia? he asks. Yes as always, stress probably, I say. Then a short time later, Gregory Porter singing ‘the motor city is burning’ from the other room. I am standing next to him leaning against the wooden work surface. The anticipation makes some of these things worse, somethings are better though. I am so stiff, he says. I sympathise with him, i am lying of course as I think he has overworked his fragile body… .We are alone in the kitchen and he is making more coffee, his balance off because of the stiffness, I massage his shoulders and rub his back. I can hear the kids talking to Elsa in the hall as she comes downstairs to the kitchen. One of the things I find most sad about our situation is that we cannot prevent some events happening that we would like to, he says… I understand what he is saying, it’s a conversation we have had many times and will have again in the coming decades. We cannot edit our history, only do somethings better, harm some people we didn’t before, be gentler where we can. end. and not be as surprised as we were last time. His sigh makes me think of leaves falling in the woods in autumn. Perhaps we’ll see the leaves fall off some of the trees we have planted this autumn. I’m glad you don’t own the bank any longer, i always found that difficult before. For my part, I say to him, I regret having to be closer to the council this time. I lean against him. It will rain again later… the repressed signifier gives itself up under cover of the image.
